Playboy 1962

THE BLOODY PULPS nostalgia By CHARLES BEAUMONT

in the days of our youth they were not deemed good reading and to us at the time they weren’t good, they were great PLAYBOY, September 1962 2

THERE WAS A RITUAL. potent literary drug known to boy, and all of us It was dark and mysterious, as rituals ought to suffer withdrawal symptoms to this day. No one be, and—for those who enacted it—a holy and ever kicked the pulps cold turkey. They were too enchanted thing. powerful an influence. Instead, most of us tried to If you were a prepubescent American male in the ease off. Having dreamed of owning complete sets, Twenties, the Thirties or the Forties, chances are in mint condition, of all the pulp titles ever you performed the ritual. If you were a little too published, and having realized perhaps a tenth part tall, a little too short, a little too fat, skinny, pimply, of the dream—say, 1500 magazines, or a an only child, painfully shy, awkward, scared of bedroomful—we suffered that vague disen- girls, terrified of bullies, poor at your schoolwork chantment that is the first sign of approaching (not because you weren’t bright but because you maturity (16, going on 17, was usually when it wouldn’t apply yourself), uncomfortable in large happened) and decided to be sensible. Accordingly, crowds, given to brooding, and totally and we stopped buying all the new mags as fast as they overwhelmingly convinced of your personal could appear, and concentrated instead upon a few inadequacy in any situation, then you certainly indispensable items. Gradually we cut down until performed it. we were keeping up the files on only three or four, Which is to say, you worshiped at the shrine of or possibly five or six, publications. After a few the pulps. years, when we had left high school, we got the What were the pulps? number down to two. Which is where most of us Cheaply printed, luridly illustrated, sensationally stand today. We don’t read the magazines, of written magazines of fiction aimed at the lower and course. But we go on buying them. Not regularly, lower-middle classes. and not in any sense because we want to, but Were they any good? No. They were great. because we must. It is an obligation, a duty, to the Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, G-8 and bright untroubled selves we were. To plunge any His Battle Aces, The Phantom, Adventure, Argosy, further into adulthood would be an act of betrayal. Blue Book, Black Mask, Thrilling Wonder Stories, But the times have betrayed us, anyway. The Marvel Tales—and all the hundred-and-one other pulps, as we knew and loved them, are gone. The titles that bedizened the newsstands of America in gaudy, gory covers, the dramatic interior the halcyon days—provided ecstasy and euphoria illustrations, the machine-gun prose, the rough, of a type unknown to this gloomy generation. They rich-smelling, wood-chip-speckled paper—all gone. made to crawl deliciously young scalps. They The so-called “pulps” of 1962 are nothing of the inspired, excited, captivated, hypnotized—and, kind. They are slickly printed, slickly written unexpectedly, instructed—the reckless young who echoes of their own great past. Look at Argosy now, have become responsible adults. Of course, they and then think of the magazine as it was when H. were infra dig. In line with the imperishable Bedford-Jones and A. Hyatt Verrill and Arthur Leo American concept that anything that is purely Zagat were waging their bloody Mongol wars; pick enjoyable must be a sin, the pulps were considered up the diminutive, pocket-size, lightweight sinful. Although they were, at their worst (or best), Amazing Stories and try to imagine it 20 years ago fractionally as “objectionable” as the immoral, when its special quarterly edition was the size of a amoral, violent, perverted product available dictionary (unabridged) and more exciting than a nowadays to any tennis-shoe-shod sub-teen who ride in a roller coaster. Buy one of these has the price of admission to a movie theater or emasculated ghosts and display it on a subway. access to a television set, they were proscribed by Wait for the frowns, and go on waiting forever— most parents and all educators. Thus we indulged in there won’t be any. The “pulps” are now socially them in much the same way that we indulged in the acceptable, and I can think of no greater damnation other purely enjoyable facts of life. Which was an of them. altogether agreeable state of affairs. Fortunately, the Only the well-remembered “eight-pagers” (Toots psychologists of the day did not understand the and Casper, Dick Tracy, etc.) carried a greater special sweetness of the stolen watermelon. So they stigma than the old-time adventure magazines. denounced the pulps, wrote tracts on the fearful Happily, no sober, critical evaluation of pulps is consequences certain to befall those whose minds possible. Like any other narcotic, they defy rational were polluted by “the newsstand trash” and analysis. One can speak of their effects, even of otherwise did their best to create a nation of their ingredients, but not—without wearisome and addicts. unconvincing pomposity—of their causes. Addicts we certainly were. We gave ourselves Something in them froze the addict’s critical over wholly to the habit and pursuit of the most faculties. He might entertain a difference of opinion PLAYBOY, September 1962 3 on the relative merits of Putnam’s translation of god: lithe, sinewy, powerful. Nor was this a happy Don Quixote as opposed to Shelton’s, but on the accident of nature, but, rather, the result of rigid subject of Weird Tales he was, and is, adamant. discipline. The Doc Savage Plan of Living was Reacting with typically honest fury to criticism eventually made available to the general readership, of one of his favorite pulp writers, the eminent “in answer to innumerable requests.” However, the regional novelist and historian August Derleth editor warned us that: “Important as these exercises wrote not too long ago: “With that sublime, may be, and as much as they may accomplish in egocentric stupidity which characterizes a certain building you up physically, mentally and morally, subspecies of frustrate which goes in for book they should be only the basis for bigger things in reviewing in order to find some compensation for life.” What bigger things the editor had in mind, we its own singular lack of creative ability by did not know. If through the Plan of .Living we deprecating the work of those who are creative, a attained the abilities of Doc Savage (and the reviewer recently brushed aside a book of implication was that we would), then we must be supernatural tales as being, after all, ‘only pulp- equal to anything, for the Man of Bronze was even fiction.’ The reviewer offered no evidence of being more accomplished than any of his five assistants— able to say just what stigma attached to writing for and they were the best in the world: the so-called ‘pulp’ magazines.” Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, Of course the reviewer who enraged Derleth “Ham” for short, Harvard Law School’s most could not have been an addict, so he ought to be distinguished graduate and America’s best-dressed forgiven; particularly in that, no matter what he man, who carried a natty black cane within which said, he was probably right. To the hooked, those nestled a slender sword tipped with a mysterious wild and wonderful stories were all great; to the sleep-inducing drug developed by: unhooked (a state of being difficult for the hooked Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett “Monk” to imagine), they were no doubt dreadful, hardly to Mayfair, one of the world’s greatest chemists, a be classed as literature. shy, gentle, squeaky-voiced man with the build of a It is true that they were unlike any other gorilla and the tenacity of a scorpion; literature to which we had been exposed. Before Colonel John Renwick, engineer extraordinary, our encounters with Black Mask and similar whose gallon-pail fists came in handy whenever a periodicals, we tended to think of adventures as thick door panel needed smashing in; belonging to a previous age. Buccaneers. Indians, Major Thomas J. “Long Tom” Roberts, an Frontier Fighters, Soldiers of Fortune—all were in electrical wizard, sturdy of mind, frail of physique; the past, we thought. Then we read the pulps and And, far from least, the archeologist and learned that adventure surrounded us, that danger geologist, William Harper Littlejohn, whose was omnipresent, evil a threat to be countered at all specialty was the English language. He would have odds, and science not a laboratory curiosity but, sent us all scurrying to our dictionaries had not instead, an active tool. We learned a lot of other author Kenneth Robeson thoughtfully translated his things, too, including the quaint but useful lesson transcendental philological peregrinations. (As it that it is more rewarding to be a good guy than a was, “Johnny” did contribute importantly to our bad guy. vocabularies. For a time we all used his colorful Take Doc Savage (as we did, in large uncut substitute for profanity: “I’ll be super- doses). Here truly was a worthwhile idol, a man amalgamated!”) among men. His admirers called him “The Mental With this fabulous confederacy of adventurers, Marvel,” “The Scientific Genius,” “The Muscular headed always by Clark Savage, Jr., M.D. Midas.” His enemies called him “The Yankee (specializing in brain surgery when he was not Menace.” He fought on the side of Right, inspiring fighting the International Cartels of Evil), we fear and respect in those who would threaten the traveled under the earth’s surface, beneath the sea, U.S. of A., instantaneous passion in all women who into palaces of ice at the North Pole, through the ever caught a glimpse of him, and joy in the hearts jungles of Southeast Asia, into vast caverns on the of his many fans. We loved him. For his Equator, and down the reeky slums of the world’s indefatigable attacks on the fortress of Evil, surely; biggest and most mysterious cities. We were and for his incredible feats of derring-do; but introduced by Robeson (a nom de plume for mostly we loved him because of his willingness to pulpster Lester Dent) to Kant and Lombroso. We share with us the secrets of his self-development were imbued with a healthy respect for scientists in exercises. Doc was a model of fitness. The wisdom particular and education in general. How else save of the old fox shone from his “strange, flake-gold through education could Doc have invented such eyes,” but his bronzed body was that of a young marvels as his machine pistol, which fired “mercy PLAYBOY, September 1962 4 bullets,” gas pellets or explosive shells at so “There Badger saw The Shadow. fantastic a rate of speed that it sounded like an “Had he faced an armed policeman, the mobster extended low note played on a bull fiddle; or his would have fired. But sight of The Shadow capacity detector, which like an old regenerative overwhelmed him. Blazing eyes made the wounded radio emitted a squeal whenever its field was crook falter. His gun hand wavered; sagged. interrupted; or the candy bar that kept you awake “A product of the underworld, Badger was one and supplied vitamins at the same time; or the wrist who had bragged often that he would like the radios, the automatic door openers, the self- chance to gain a pot shot at The Shadow. But in this contained underwater breathing apparatus, etc.? crisis, Badger failed. Within two or three issues after its introduction, “The Shadow had expected it.” the Doc Savage magazine was selling 200,000 To those of us who lived with The Shadow copies per month. Robeson/Dent cranked out over a through twoscore pulp-paper perils, the radio hundred novel-length adventures, turning his Man episodes were a considerable letdown. Aside from of Bronze into the most popular fictional character the blood-curdling laugh and the sibilant assurances of the period. (delivered by Orson Welles) that “The weed of Then there was The Shadow. He didn’t exactly crime bears bitter fruit” and “What evil lurks in the eclipse Doc, but he cast a hell of a dark pall over hearts of men? The Shadow knows,” we felt that our hero. We thought it was because he was more there was too little resemblance between the radio believable. After all, didn’t each story begin with show and the “real” adventures. The half-hour the declaimer that it was “from the private annals of dramatizations were interesting enough, but really, The Shadow, as told to Maxwell Grant”? Of course. The Shadow did not have to depend upon hypnosis It was no problem to believe that Lamont Cranston (“. . . the power to cloud men’s minds”) in order to existed and that the man known as The Shadow make his way unseen across rooftops and through assumed his identity whenever it was necessary for dim hallways. And, there was entirely too much him to emerge from the blackness of the city night hanky-panky with Margo Lane, a sex interest who to accomplish some high-level mission. Unlike drifted into the magazine’s previously chaste pages Doc, who operated in a realm where law- and did much to confirm our suspicion that women enforcement officers were seldom present, ought to leave important matters to men. Cranston carried on a regular fox-and-hounds with The scripts for the radio dramas were written by the police, and in particular with Inspector Cardona. Harry Charlot, who died in a poisoning mystery as The milieu, if not the situations, was recognizable. intriguing as any Shadow novel; but each of the 178 Fans who knew this master crime fighter only book-lengthers—7,500,000 words of print—was through his radio adventures knew him not at all. turned out by Maxwell Grant. For the real lowdown, you had to go to the Looking back on those two great heroes, Doc magazines. There, in the pulpy pages, he existed in and The Shadow, one wonders what ever prompted all his weird and inexplicable glory. the disapproving attitude held by adults. Search as From his sanctum in an unidentified warehouse they might through the corpus of English literature, (lit only by a blue lamp), The Shadow they could not have found two such spotless, communicated through his contact man, Burbank, virtuous, moral and right-thinking characters. with a small army of operatives: Hawkeye, a small- Perhaps it was this: that at the time, we were time crook; Cliff Marsland, a free-lance mobster; receiving the dregs of a prejudice that had been Harry Vincent, sometime reporter; and the developed in a previous generation against “yellow indispensable hackie, Moe Shrevnitz. Upon journalism”; and that our pulps were the receiving news of impending, or recently descendants of a long line of lower-class literature, committed, crime, The Shadow would blend into much of it salacious, all of it beneath the attention the dimness of the evening and appear—with or of the better element. without his confederates—to challenge the worst of For our pulps were no instant phenomenon of the evils. A master of disguises, he did not rely entirely period but, instead, the outgrowth of a fiction form on concealment: a bit of wax in the cheeks, a touch now 130 years old. of makeup here and there, an affected slouch, limp . . . or drooped shoulder, and he might become a Bowery bum, a cripple or even a scrubwoman. He When titles for paperbacked books hawked by was also a master psychologist, as demonstrated in chapmen who peddled shoelaces and pincushions Maxwell Grant’s straightforward prose (which was still ran to such intriguing lengths as: “The the actual cause of The Shadow’s ascendancy over Affecting History of Sally Williams; afterwards Doc Savage): Tippling Sally. Shewing how she left her father’s PLAYBOY, September 1962 5 house to follow an officer, who seduced her; and Hickok, Texas Jack and a youngster named how she took to drinking, and at last became a vile William Frederick Cody. prostitute, died in a hospital and was dissected by Cody wore his golden hair at shoulder length, the surgeons. Tending to shew the pernicious sported a goatee, fringed jacket and wide-brimmed effects of dram drinking,” there was an experiment cowboy hat, and was altogether the living prototype begun in a more flexible medium for popular of the fictional Western hero “Ned Buntline” had in reading than the books—the newspaper. When all mind. Assisted by Cody’s grandiloquent tales of the available news was quick and easily disposed of hunting expeditions and Indian battles, plus a in a page or two, it was natural that other attractions recounting of his ceaseless efforts to avenge the should be used to fill space. Accordingly, fictional death of his father in the Bloody Kansas struggle, narratives were tried with instantaneous success. Buntline started the most popular series of stories The outgrowth of this was the family story America had ever read. Not that E. Z. C. Judson paper, an institution that persisted until the turn of was a tyro seeking inspiration. He was, at the time this century. The story papers secured and kept of his “Know Nothing” Party riot in New York, one readership by offering “plenty of sensation and no of the best paid writers in the world. But his own philosophy,” as Robert Bonner—publisher of one experiences were, so he thought, commonplace. He of the most famous and long-lived of the was certain that realistic yarns of the new frontier publications—described their approach. In the would eclipse any personal reminiscences he could guise of uplifting and edifying the public about get into print. So he decided to “immortalize” conditions at large, these prepulpsters gleefully Buffalo Bill. exploited the seamy and vice-ridden side of life. The great cowboy’s saga began irresistibly, It was but a step from fictionalizing the lives of setting a style which seldom varied: actual people to the creation of fictional beings who Ned Buntline’s Great Story !! would be passed off as real. The Old Sleuth, who first appeared in The Fireside Companion in 1872, Buffalo Bill was the direct sire of all the thousand private eyes The King of the Border Men! whose legal depredations have flourished in print, The wildest and truest story on the air and on the screen, ever since. He was I ever wrote. thought for many years to be a genuine living person, but when his creators began running as By NED BUNTLINE many as three different installment adventures in (E. Z. C. Judson) each weekly paper, the public caught on. No mere CHAPTER I human could possibly accomplish in one lifetime “An oasis of green wood on a Kansas prairie—a the deeds attributed to The Old Sleuth. bright stream shining like liquid silver in the However, no one doubted the existence of the moonlight—a log house built under the limbs of next pulp hero: Buffalo Bill. With his appearance, great trees—within this home, a happy group. This the younger generation of boys—untempted by is my first picture. aged detectives and love-stuff—began to devour “Look well on the leading figure in that group. the story papers; and a tradition was born. General You will see him but once, yet on his sad fate disapproval was followed by pulpit blasts, hinges all the wild and fearful realities which are to confiscation, hide-tannings and stern talkings-to. follow, drawn to a very great extent, not from But the kids had found an idol. imagination but from life itself . . .” Buffalo Bill is inextricably entwined with the legend of his creator, Ned Buntline, otherwise Buntline goes on to describe the family at its known as Edward Zane Carroll Judson, whose real evening devotions. Then, suddenly, there is the life was far more fraught with peril and adventure sound of hoof-beats. A cry: “Hallo—the house!” than William Cody’s ever was. Father Cody opens the door. He is greeted by the Judson: ran away to sea at the age of 11; served jeers of Southern sympathizers and the taunts of in the Seminole War in Florida; was lynched by an “Colonel M’Kandlas”—who levels his pistol and incensed mob in Nashville, Tennessee, after he’d fires! Father Cody, good husband and outstanding killed a jealous husband in a duel; escaped the Christian, clutches at his chest and falls dead before lynching when the rope broke; organized a riot in his horrified family. Then: New York City and was jailed for a year; fought with the Union Army in the Civil War, emerging as “‘If them gals was a little older—but never a colonel with 20 bullets in his body; then went mind, boys, this will be a lesson for the sneaks that West to roam the untamed land with Wild Bill come upon the border—let’s be off, for there’s PLAYBOY, September 1962 6 plenty more work to do before daylight!’ continued chewing, bearded rube; a top-hatted industrialist the wretch, turning the head of his horse to ride puffing a cigar; and a toothy Negro. It was plain away. that Carter was a master of the art of changing “‘Stop!’ appearance. He carried paints, droopy mustaches “It was but a single word—spoken, too, by a boy and wigs at all times, and could become another whose blue eyes shone wildly in a face as white as person faster than Clark Kent turns into Superman. new-fallen snow and full as cold—spoken as he Unlike the shamus we know in current literature, stood erect over the body of his dead father, Nick disdained alcohol, tobacco and sex. Yet, in the weaponless and alone. true traditions of his craft, he encouraged the “Yet that ruffian, aye, and all of his mad perpetration of mayhem upon his person, suffering wreckless crew, stopped as if a mighty spell was as many head-cloutings, jaw-smashings, laid upon them. waylayings and maimings as his descendant, Mike “‘You, Jake M’Kandlas, have murdered my Hammer. father! You, base cowards, who saw him do this When we consider that the writers who filled the dark deed, spoke no word to restrain him. I am only pages of our favorite crime-laden paperbacks were Little Bill, his son, but as God in Heaven hears me brought up, most of them, on Nick Carter, we can now, I will kill every father’s son of you before the understand the near inflexibility of the stalwart, beard grows on my face!’” high-principled hero enmeshed in violent situations formula. It carried the first recognizable private eye “Little Bill” soon became big Bill, and in weekly to peaks of popularity even higher than those installments held the nation captive as he sought attained by Buffalo Bill. vengeance, killed buffalo, scouted the plains, led . . . the Cavalry to victory after victory, and dueled with the fiercest Indian chiefs. He was the bravest man Most of the out-and-out sensationalism to which on earth and the most exciting figure in all of educators and clergymen objected in the 19th literature—to small-fry, anyway. Century was contained not in the Street & Smith His popularity continued for many years, carried pulps but in the physically similar dime novels. on after Judson’s death by an equally improbable Beadle & Adams, publishers, clothed their little writer named Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, who had publications in orange covers, but the content was fought with Lee and Juárez. But after a while Street usually “yellow.” & Smith—then, as now, the leading pulp Within this form one of America’s best-known, publishers—decided that Westerns were on the least-talented and most fondly remembered authors wane. So they began to think of other ways to tap made his mark. Horatio Alger, Jr., wrote 119 books the pockets of youngsters. (or, as a critic commented, “one book, rewritten Although entertainments were not omnipresent, 118 times”) about poor boys who persevered as they are today, loose coin was in throughout adversity and gained wealth and fame as correspondingly short supply. Accordingly, it took their reward. There was nothing in these morality a solid jolt on the cover of a magazine (the natural tales to shock the mildest country minister (indeed, development of the story papers) and a substantial Alger was a sometime Unitarian minister himself), dose of interior escape to effect the transfer of a yet they were frowned upon and, probably as a week’s spending money from knickers to result, sold an almost unbelievable 250,000,000 newsstand vendors. copies. Nick Carter was the answer. In his college days, Alger was known as “Holy He first appeared as the protégé of “Seth Parker, Horatio,” generally because of his starchy, the old detective” (a not-too-subtle revival of The abstemious nature and specifically because one Old Sleuth) in a story written by John Russell night he refused to cooperate with his landlady, Coryell. Ormond Smith, at that time head of the who had walked into his room stark naked and Street & Smith firm, liked the idea of a young asked him to join her in a tango. A subsequent trip detective, and assigned Frederick van Rensselaer to Paris, however, fired him with worldly ideas and Dey to do a series featuring Nick Carter. It was an experiences—he wrote in his diary: “I was a fool to immediate sensation. have waited so long. It is not nearly so vile as I had The masthead of The Nick Carter Weekly thought”—and he returned to the United States portrayed a clean-cut collar-ad youth in the center willing, if not downright eager, to sample earthly of the page, surrounded by sketches of “Nick Carter joys. Of course, as everyone knows who has ever in various disguises”: a queued Chinese laborer; a brushed with his literary corpus, no trace of this monocled fop; a gray-haired grandmother; a straw- moral liberation ever found its way into the Horatio PLAYBOY, September 1962 7

Alger, Jr., books, except as illustrations of the evils For more than 30 years, Western Story Magazine young men must struggle to avoid. These (the Buffalo Bill subtitle was soon dropped) illustrations gobbled up dimes from the nation’s appeared twice a month. Most of us cut our teeth on youth and were passed along in secret delight like it. While Soldiers of Fortune, Scientific Detectives so many pornographic pictures. and Yellow Menaces provided aperitif, appetizer With the appearance of Frank Merriwell, the and dessert, the changeless saga of the American Street & Smith company assumed unchallenged West was our main course. Every kid on every leadership of the adventure-fiction market. block dreamed of being a sheriff, and “Cowboys” Merriwell—a Yale student, as everyone knows; or, was the national game. more properly, the Yale student—was created by Thanks in large part to a moody, tortured genius Burt L. Standish, in the late 1890s. Standish’s called Frederick Schiller Faust. We didn’t know experience with the university he was to him by that name. We knew Max Brand, George immortalize consisted of his attendance at a half- Owen Baxter, Martin Dexter, Evin Evans, David dozen football games and a single stroll around the Manning, Peter Dawson, John Frederick, Pete campus; yet he made Yale so real and Merriwell so Morland. But they were all Faust, the most believable that enrollment at the college increased incredibly prolific—and unquestionably the best— by hundreds. pulp writer in the business. The literary quality of these stories was His almost innumerable stories were usually regrettably low, though not so low as in the Alger variations of the primitive Vengeance theme, yet epics. The late George Jean Nathan actually they had—and have—an unaccountable freshness claimed to enjoy them and often beat the drum for a and vitality. Unaccountable, that is, until one recalls return to those simple values. He regarded the that Brand/Faust had the instincts, if not the skill, of absence of a Standish biography as the most glaring a serious author. For pulp fiction in general, and his and insupportable omission in American literary own in particular, he had supreme contempt. He history. “His readers numbered millions,” Nathan never read over his first drafts. He never saw the complained. “For one who read Mark Twain’s magazines in which his work appeared; indeed, the Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer, there were first rule of his house was that no adventure 10,000 who read Standish’s Frank Merriwell’s magazine of any description would be tolerated on Dilemma or The Rescue of Inza and Frank the premises. He genuinely hated “Max Brand” and Merriwell at Yale or The Winning Last Quarter- the rest of the pseudonymous stable. Yet he was the Mile. The little candy and cigar stores of that day, absolute master of the craft, and of every other the chief distributing centers of the Standish opera, form of writing except that which he most had longer lines of small boys with nickels in their respected. At serious prose and poetry he was, hands every Friday than Barnum’s or Forepaugh’s fortunately for us and tragically for him, a failure. circus could ever boast . . .” His occasional slim volumes, published under his . . . real name, were mostly attic-scented, bloodless, pedestrian, worthless. And he knew it, and it broke Pawnee Bill, John L., Jr., Clif Faraday of his heart. Annapolis, Mark Mallory of West Point and Tiring of the pulps’ low pay, Brand moved on to Diamond Dick were the heroes who followed the slicks where he was equally successful. Warner Merriwell. They were uniformly antiseptic types, Brothers paid him $3000 a week. MGM gave him a but they assumed a degree of importance to fortune for creating Dr. Kildare (currently a America’s mass readership that no literary creation television series). He made more money than any of recent times has been able to duplicate. For years other writer of that period, yet he was consistently they rode tall, shrugging off the bullets of Wrong- broke. “It costs me $70,000 a year just to survive,” doers and the slings and arrows of critics; but they he commented at a time when $4000 was considered could not defend themselves against their greatest a good annual wage. enemy: Growing Sophistication. One by one they Seeking refuge from his disappointment, Faust bit the dust. Buffalo Bill was the last to fall, and a became an alcoholic and, in 1938, was sent to Italy sad day it was. He was laid to rest in 1919 and to die. Instead of dying, he fell in love with the mourned on the masthead of the zippy, modern country and developed into one of its champion magazine that did him in. tennis players. He took up horseback riding. He It is that magazine—Western Story Magazine— bought an Isotta-Fraschini and earned the sobriquet Formerly New Buffalo Bill Weekly—which forms “The Fast American.” But all the while, he our direct link with the past. continued to crank out his pulp fiction. He had to. Compelled to find an excuse for the failure that, he PLAYBOY, September 1962 8 knew, would eventually crush him, he bought a achieved a great deal more. Most pulp addicts were palatial villa in Florence, staffed it with servants foxy enough to know that the cover of a magazine and tutors, and kept his standard of living seldom bore the slightest connection to the fiction it stratospherically high. He was still the King of the was supposed to illustrate, that, indeed, the “backs” Pulps when the war broke out. Deeply affected, and were simply come-ons for saps and suckers; yet we yearning for some real adventure, Faust—aged revered those pulp artists and regarded their 51—managed to talk the American Army into contribution, and their position, as being equal to giving him a set of war correspondent credentials. those of the writers. His first assignment, on the front lines, was his last. Consider a typical Spicy Detective Stories cover. Fifth man over the top, he was cut down by enemy This rich oeuvre portrayed a leggy blonde whose fire; and so he died, clutching an olive branch, in pink-and-white skin was so dewy fresh as to be the Italian hills he loved. palpable. Clad only in ripped black-lace panties, By a mysterious coincidence, the pulps them- she clutched another garment to her meticulously selves began to cough out their life at about this rendered, melon-heavy breasts, concealing little of time, as though the passing of their king had left either. Her face was a mask of fear, and with good them blind and weak and unable to survive. reason: a blue-black automatic thrust toward her . . . like a finger of doom. Needless to say, no such scene was to be We heard no death knell. As we stretched out on encountered in the lead story (titillatingly titled the lawn swing with a copy of Spicy Detective Murder in the Harem). In this classic “dirty Stories, we heard only the whisssk-whisssk-whisssk magazine,” confiscated on sight by all parents and of the rotating sprinklers, the distant rumble of custodians, sex was treated with the slightly leering streetcars and a voice crying “Ole ole ocean but profound innocence of the neighborhood know- freeeee!” And, of course, Dan Turner’s gun, all. The authors, chief among them Robert Leslie sneezing kachow-kachow! The world was a small, Bellem, larded their narratives with suggestive quiet place for most of us then, and it was for that dialog and took care to describe “her silk-clad, reason, as much as for any other, that we escaped lissome body,” “a flash of white thigh,” “breasts into the vast, noisy world of the pulps. straining at their silken prison,” etc., but the truth is They were at the crest of their popularity just that a diet of reading restricted to Spicy Detective before and during the war years. Hundreds of titles Stories would do nothing to dissuade one from offered an almost unbelievable variety of reading belief in the theory of the stork. The same holds for experiences to the American teenager, and most such other “legendary” pulps as Spicy Western, were well within the boundaries of good taste—the Spicy-Adventure and Breezy Stories. They were not same boundaries over which our television so much read as examined, or searched, for “hot networks leap casually every hour of every day in parts”; and if the editors had been thoughtful this age. enough to print the mildly erotic sections in a It must be admitted, however, that only those different color, they would have saved us all a lot of who actually bothered to read the magazines could time. be expected to understand this. Their physical There were three genuinely erotic pulp appearance suggested nothing short of mortal sin. magazines, but their disguises were so excellent Something about the quality of the paper—so that the authorities didn’t catch on for months. exciting to kids—summoned up, for adults, visions Horror Stories, Terror Tales and Marvel Tales of brothels, public toilets, French postcards and would all curl your hair, even today. Ostensibly petty crime. The illustrations, generally of a low science fiction-supernatural publications, they order of craftsmanship, depicted scenes of extreme packed more honest perversion into one page than violence. But it was the covers, more than anything one could find in Tijuana’s most notorious den of else, that turned the grownup world against the iniquity. Plain, ordinary, garden-variety sex was pulps. To say that they were lurid is to say that the eschewed. In its place, we were given flagellation, Atlantic Ocean is wet. They were fantastic. In a sadism, orgies, homosexuality, pederasty, and a way unknown to me, and unduplicated by artists in host of diversions that popped the eyes from the any other field, those masters of the brush managed sweaty heads of teenagers throughout the country. to work sex, action, horror, terror, beauty, ugliness, A typical story concerned the evil mistress of a virtue, sin, and a dozen other elements, into every castle who, out of ennui, staged impressive parties, picture they painted. Their goal was to tempt the during which she would drug her guests, take them newsstand browser into parting with cash, and this to a dungeon, clap them in irons and torture them to goal they achieved with complete success. But they death. Lush young girls were stripped naked, after PLAYBOY, September 1962 9 which operation their hostess would approach with Amazing and its sister publication Fantastic a branding iron and burn the nipples from their Adventures led the field, with Startling and breasts. Thrilling Wonder close behind. Such was the Our attention to these magazines could fairly be appeal of their product that thousands of kids described as rapt; however, they perished in due formed fan clubs, issued mimeographed and course, and I believe we were all just a bit relieved. hectographed magazines, and developed into a vast Relief did not attend the passing, though, of our but highly insular phenomenon known as Sf- legitimate friends. Argosy—the Argosy of the six- fandom. To belong, one had merely to be part serials, of Zagat and Verrill and Brand, of something of a nut, so membership was all but Mongol hordes and incredible sea voyages— unlimited. The object of Sf-fandom was avowedly staggered on awhile, then turned into a slick; and the dissemination of inside information about and we mourned. Doc Savage left us. The Shadow, too. the glorification of science fiction, but in actuality it One by one, the great magazines ceased was a correspondence club for social misfits, most publication. of whom devoted more time to the reading of letters The last survivors were the best and the from fellow fans, or fen (as their own plural had it), favorites: the science-fiction and fantasy than to the professional magazines. It gave magazines. They had everything the other pulps teenagers a rare and exciting sense of belonging had, and more. The grand old advertisements were and from its ragtag ranks have come many of there. Sherwin Cody counseled us to speak better today’s most successful authors and scientists, so it English from the pages of Amazing Stories. We may be judged to have been one of the happier continued to read of the near-tragedies averted by outgrowths of the pulp craze. the use of Eveready flashlight batteries. The kindly, The authors we venerated, when we were not gray-haired man who proclaimed: “I talked with corresponding with new friends, were of a vanished God! Yes, I did—actually and literally!” was with breed: the loving hacks. They wrote for money us; we could still Find Out Today how we could (averaging two cents per word in the s-f heyday), train at home to become radio technicians; we but it was not their only goad. Pulpsters like could buy Beautiful Lifelike Photo Rings; Learn Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, Don Wilcox, Music as Easy as A-B-C; grace our faces with David Wright O’Brian, William P. McGivern, good-looking glasses for $2.95; insure our whole Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, family for $1 a month; cure our piles with Page’s William Lawrence Hamling, Ray Palmer and Pile Tablets; or learn the Mysteries of Life by Manley Wade Wellman wrote pulp fiction joining the Rosicrucians. primarily because they had a hell of a good time Most important, we could still thrill to high doing it; and however the quality of their stories adventure—in a day when high adventure was might have varied, the enthusiasm with which they becoming suspect—with the wonderful space set those stories down remained consistently high. operas offered by most of the publications. For the Whether they wrote of X-ray spectacles or time junior Scientists and Astronauts among us, there travel or beast kings of Jupiter, they wrote with was Astounding Science Fiction, a no-nonsense genuine gusto. magazine featuring the extrapolations of such sober Until 1950. and serious men as A. E. Van Vogt, Robert 1950 may be taken, loosely, as the year the pulps Heinlein, John W. Campbell, Lester del Rey and gave their last kick. A few lingered on, twitching, George O. Smith. For the rest of us, either too then they, too, expired, and the pulps became young or too unsophisticated—or perhaps another odd part of our heritage—fondly insufficiently bright—to enjoy Astounding, there remembered by millions of ex-kids who never were Fantastic Adventures, Startling Stories, asked to grow out of those summer twilights. Thrilling Wonder Stories, Super Science, Captain It is easy to sneer at the crumbling yellow Future, Unknown Worlds, Weird Tales and—for magazines, and at the people responsible for them; the real, dyed-in-the-wool pulp hounds—Planet but we should salute instead, for we owe the pulps Stories, which featured Westerns, pirate sagas and an incalculable debt, of gratitude. They stimulated, Viking tales, all set on planets other than Earth. The prodded and jostled our young minds; they heavies in Planet were invariably BEMs, or Bug broadened our narrow horizons; they gave us a Eyed Monsters, the heroines invariably “lush” or splendid outlet for our natural pent-up violence. “generously proportioned,” the heroes invariably Though attacked as propagators of delinquency, it “bronzed and muscular,” the prose invariably is doubtful that the pulps ever led so much as one atrocious and exciting. youngster astray; indeed, a glance at the criminal records of the day will reveal that the true PLAYBOY, September 1962 10 delinquents seldom read anything but the fine print truly, gone, and forever. Nor can they be brought on cigarette packages. Parents’ forebodings back. notwithstanding, the pulps helped us in many ways, Still . . . if you listen very hard, very late at strengthened and comforted us, led us to an night, perhaps you will hear, distantly, the clang of appreciation of literature and prepared us, if not for swords, the drum of hoofs, the rat-tat-tat of tommy life, then at least for dreams. guns and the spine-chilling laugh of a man they Now they are gone, echoed dimly in the novels called The Shadow. I know I do. of Ian Fleming, their corpses dancing grotesquely in the flickering light of the television tube, but,

PLAYBILL … The words “Horror!” “Terror!” and “Thrilling!” are as much a part of the ad game as the three-martini lunch. But they are also the names of a few of The Bloody Pulps, those likably lurid dime novels for which whole forests were leveled and upon which a whole generation of American youth was hair-raised. Thumbing his way back through the pulps’ ragged pages and rugged prose, Charles Beaumont, our master of memorabilia, now treats us to another of his nostalgic tours of the not-so-long ago. When not digging into the past for PLAYBOY, Beaumont has found time to write 70 television plays and 10 full-length motion pictures. Among his TV credits are scripts for Thriller; Dick Powell Theater; Have Gun, Will Travel and Twilight Zone (for which he, Rod Serling and PLAYBOY contributor Richard Matheson shared an Emmy). His movies include The Brothers Grimm; The Intruder; Burn, Witch, BEAUMONT Burn; and several others awaiting release.